Russia says it will begin pullout from Georgia on Monday

Published 1:13 pm Sunday, August 17, 2008

GORI, Georgia — Russia’s president promised to start withdrawing forces from positions in Georgia on Monday, but suggested they could stay in the breakaway region at the heart of the fighting that has reignited Cold War tensions.

Top American officials said Washington would rethink its relationship with Moscow after its military drive deep into its much smaller neighbor and called for a swift Russian withdrawal.

“I think that there is a real concern that Russia has turned the corner here and is headed back toward its past rather than toward its future, and my hope is that we will see actions in the weeks and months to come that provide us some reassurance,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said today.

Bolstered by Western support, Georgia’s leader vowed never to abandon its claim to territory now firmly in the hands of Russia and its separatist allies, even though he has few means of asserting control. His pledge, echoed by Western insistence that Georgia must not be broken apart, portends further tension over separatist South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

In Gori, a strategic central city in the small former Soviet republic, there were signs of a looser Russian grip — and scenes of desperation as Georgians crowded around aid vehicles and grasped for loaves of bread.

Virtually all shops were closed and the streets almost empty, save for clusters of people who gathered around aid vehicles and a basement bakery.

Georgia hit the Russia-backed separatist region of South Ossetia with a massive barrage on Aug. 7, and Russian troops rolled in, advancing far into the Caucasus Mountain nation and raising fears of a long-term occupation of a country at the center of a power struggle between a resurgent Russia and the West.

The troops would leave, a Russian lawmaker said, “sooner or later.”

“But how much time it will take, it depends, definitely, on how Georgians will continue to behave,” said the lawmaker, Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of a Russian parliament foreign affairs committee.

Facing increasingly pointed Western calls to withdraw under a cease-fire agreement, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev told France’s Nicolas Sarkozy that Russian troops would begin pulling back on Monday, headed toward South Ossetia. He stopped short of promising they would return to Russia.

The EU-backed cease-fire agreement calls for Georgian and Russian troops to withdraw to the positions they held before fighting broke out Aug. 7.

But Medvedev’s silence on South Ossetia has fueled fears that Russia could annex the region, which — like Abkhazia — broke from Georgia government control in the 1990s and has declared independence. Getting Abkhazia alone would increase the length of Russia’s Black Sea coast by more than 25 percent.

“Georgia will never give up a square kilometer of its territory,” Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili told a news conference alongside Germany’s Angela Merkel, the latest Western leader to visit Tbilisi and offer support for the country he has led on a pro-Western path, seeking to shake off a history of domination by Moscow.

“I expect a very fast, very prompt withdrawal of Russian troops out of Georgia,” Merkel said in a courtyard at Saakashvili’s official residence. She reiterated a Western promise that Georgia will eventually join NATO, but said she could not say when that would happen.